Apart from its collection of Antique Art, the Museo Barracco of the Comune di Roma also houses two important libraries. These mainly concern the arts and archeology. The first one, the Biblioteca Barracco covers the scientific and bibliographical heritage that Baron Barracco donated together with his art collection in 1904. At that time, a building to be used as a museum was erected and he housed his collection and a part of his library there. He then donated it all to the city of Rome. This made the Biblioteca Barracco unique of its kind, that is: a library planned and created as an integrated part of a scientific, educational part of a museum.
The collection comprises 280 works for a total of about 350 volumes and over 150 brochures with miscellaneous contents. Although the number of works is limited, their character is special and their quality high. These are the cornerstones of 19th Century archeology and many library treasures and rare editions of the classics of the 17th and 18th Century.
Among the major works there are the twelve volumes of the Egyptian and Nubian Monuments by Ippolito Rosellini. There are three great atlases containing thick tables often painted in water colours by hand and the twelve volumes in the Denkmaeler folios by Richard Lepsius. This is the result of a German expedition on the Nile and an impressive print in chromolithography.
The second fund comprises the library belonging to Ludwig Pollak (1868-19439 archeologist, scholar collector, art expert and merchant. He lived and worked mostly in Rome, the city he chose from 1893 till 1943, the year in which he was deported by the Rome Gestapo to the Nazi concentration camps where he disappeared together with his wife and three children.
In 1959, Margarethe Susmann Pollak, only relation and heiress of the archeologist, donated the works of art, antique belongings and the Pollack Library to the Comune di Roma who housed the latter in the Museo Barracco. Pollak had been an honorary member of the Museum for 30 years.
The Pollak Library comprises about 2,500 volumes and an archive section covering the 25 ‘Tagebucher’ (the diaries where Pollak during the period 1886 to 1934 mentioned chronicles, observations, anecdotes about the artistic and cultural life of Rome and Europe) edited and unedited notes, writings and a collection of autographs by Goethe or other personages in his circle. The library houses a ‘sezione goethiana’ of 170 editions of about 300 volumes representing all the works of the author and his voluminous bibliography.
Next to these there is the ‘sezione boema’ (130 works of the history and life in Bohemia in editions ranging from the 16th to the 19th Century) and 250 catalogues of antique auctions, 180 catalogues of museums and exhibitions and lastly about 900 brochures of archeology, history of art, glyptics, epigraphy and stamp collecting, often gifts from the same authors that bear witness to the innumerable scientific relationships of Pollak, considered in his time as one of the major European arts experts in the field and an infallible expert for frauds.
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 | I Municipio
Corso V. Emanuele II, 158 - 00185 Roma
Tel. 06 68806848
hours and entry : reservation
Property: 3000 volumes. |  |
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